Pryor's Life Story A Search for Truth BOOKS Patricia Holt

Patricia Holt:

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, May 31, 1995

Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences By Richard Pryor with Todd Gold antheon; 257 pages; $23

The sadness that lies just beneath the surface of Richard Pryor's brilliant comedy is given centerstage in this autobiography of sorts by the ailing performer, who learned he had multiple sclerosis in 1986.

That sadness has little to do with his progressive disease, however -- in fact, Pryor's courage facing a sold-out audience at the Circle Star Theater in 1992 when he could do little more than sit in a chair, "swallowing more fear than I'd known my entire life," is one of the most inspiring passages in "Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences."

But that's near the end of this lengthy recital of drug addictions (his cocaine habit alone grew from $100 a day in 1967 to nearly $700 a day by 1979), heart attacks, marriages, breakdowns, jail sentences, suicide attempts, wife-beatings, paranoia and few personal breakthroughs.

As we would expect, the heart- wrenching passages are offset by the kind of humor that made Pryor famous -- brutally honest and insanely funny exaggerations that began in his head when he was growing up in Peoria, Ill., watching "Father Knows Best" and pondering family life.

"White folks do things a lot different than niggers," he tells us in one of many italicized comic bits. "They eat quieter. 'Pass the potatoes. Thank you, darling. Could I have a bit of that sauce? How are the kids coming along in their studies? Think we'll be having sexual intercourse this evening?' "

GROWING UP SCARED

Since his mother and grandmother ran whorehouses and his father and grandfather beat their wives and children (until the women retaliated), Pryor grew up scared and lonely in a violent, vengeful world dominated by urban crime and racism. He discovers sex by crawling through ventilator shafts to peek at the prostitutes. "Once I saw my own mother in bed with a man. White dude. She didn't seem to mind. But it f-- me up." The image, in fact, plagues him.

After his first sexual experience, "I understood why that man had been on top of my mother. Getting the p-- just like me."

Separated from his mother at 10, Pryor became a self-destructive wiseacre who made people laugh even as he was kicked out of school at 14, became a shoeshine boy, pool-hall worker, strip- club janitor and piano-bar comic, always "desperate to matter."

STRIPPING AWAY PHONINESS

But what makes these pages turn is Pryor's deep and abiding compulsion to find his own truth and strip away anything phony. He hates himself for "pretending to be as slick and colorless as (Bill) Cosby" when "there was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head . . ."

The struggle to find the comic within is so tortuous that Pryor blows his chance at Las Vegas and ends up in the Bay Area trying out "bizarre" material at such clubs as Basin Street West. Some nights "I just made strange animal noises. Other nights I repeated a single word like 'bitch' or 'motherf--,' but gave it 57 different inflections." Repeating the word "nigger" "would numb me and everybody else to its wretchedness."

We witness, then, Pryor's humor gaining the same kind of integrity as that of his heroes -- Lenny Bruce, Lily Tomlin -- even as he snorts his way to oblivion with the biggies of his time (Miles Davis, Huey Newton, Freddie Prinze) and turns increasingly violent. His famous trip to Africa, in which he was transformed upon realizing that "there are no niggers here . . . the people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride," is countered by the cocaine-freebasing episode that led to setting his body on fire.

Much of Pryor's rambling and jiving -- so funny onstage -- doesn't work in print, and despite referring to himself as "a dark comic genius," he comes off as unsympathetic and unsalvageable. Still, something heroic exists in Richard Pryor, and it emerges in "Pryor Convictions."